Bucky Covington, one-time American Idol contestant, sang a song that related very strongly to me personally and to my own childhood. In the chorus of that song, he sang, “It was a different life when we were boys and girls. Not just a different time, it was a different world [1].” In the verses of the song he talked about many of the ways that his childhood (and my own) was different, in drinking water from a garden hose rather than bottled water, watching a tv with only a few channels rather than having cable or satellite, getting the tar beaten out of you for disobedience instead of the less violent forms of discipline that parents use today. It was the point of the singer, and a remarkably intelligent one, that as time passes in today’s world, generations are so distinct from each other in the way that they grew up that they feel alien, a fact which greatly contributes to our inter-generational difficulties in communication and perspectives.

I am often reminded of this fact for a variety of reasons. As a student of history, I tend to read a lot about the past. Sometimes this past is very ancient and alien, such as my strange and intense fondness for ancient Near East texts, reading about the exploits of forgotten Assyrian or Hittite kings. Sometimes the past is alien but in ways that are bracing and relevant, such as early and largely forgotten Spanish-language texts about counter-insurgency tactics dating from the 16th century beginning of the long war between the Chileans and the Mapuche. At other times, we often believe we are closer to people than we are in reality, including the early Church of God or the Founding Fathers of the United States. In all of these cases, the alien nature of the past occasionally comes through forcefully as words and concepts have changed meanings, or as distant and obscure parts of the world end up wrestling with the same problems as we do, and so what is close or far to us is deeply strange and unusual.

As a reader of historical works, I am often reminded of this alien nature of the past. For example, a few weeks ago I read a book about the World War II prisoners of war of Guam, and the author of that book made it very clear throughout the work that he had a negative view of the Japanese. Now, one of my nearest internet friends is a very caring and compassionate Japanese mother of two adventuresome and spirited boys. She is certainly far removed from yakuza gangsters or racist Japanese morning television shows or World War II atrocities as a peaceful citizen of a provincial Japanese city. In recognizing the problems that cultures face, it is important not to paint with too broad a brush given the immense variety in character and behavior among civilizations and societies. Simply because there may be very real historical influences that pull people in a negative direction does not absolve those people of personal responsibility or negate the counterexamples of decency of character.

I am reminded of the example of my great-grandfather Chauncy Mathias, a man of his time born in 1900 and who spent the last years of his life living with my grandparents in a small trailer behind where my grandparents lived. As a ten year old I was given a genealogy assignment (where I first became familiar with that field of study), and since my great-grandfather was the oldest living member of the family, I would ask him a lot of questions (as I tend to do) about his life history. He was an athletic man who had lived a very exciting life, barely missing out on the chance to go to the 1920 Olympics as a sprinter, working in Canada as a track & field coach, playing in the early NFL. Despite my love of competition and sports, I am by no means a skilled athlete (my best sports are probably volleyball and skiing). Nonetheless, we shared our common love of root beer and college football while he would talk about his (rather shockingly racist) disdain for Notre Dame because it was for Irish Catholics, or his distaste of Krauts (that would be Germans), never even recognizing his own ethnic origins. He and I were both products of our time and experience, albeit spirited enough that we made our own mark anyway despite those influences.

Let us not doubt, though, that my great-grandfather and I were citizens of different countries. My great-grandfather was born in the time before cars became widely used, and he was a man who had survived two world wars and the Great Depression, in which his family suffered great malnourishment in Canada. By the time Civil Rights reform had passed, he was already an old man in his mid-60’s. He and my maternal grandfather (his son-in-law) were old enough to have been in the Masons for social advancement. Truly, their worldview was quite alien to my own, as was evident even then as a bookish and rather intellectually curious child growing up in rural Central Florida. So, because I was an avid student of history even then, I saw their stories as humorous tales of another country as much as I enjoyed the books I read on such subjects as the American Civil War, biblical history, the castles of medieval Europe, or the fall of Constantinople to the Turks. (Looking back on it, my childhood reading was pretty grim and serious for the most part.)

Still, we need to understand that when we look at the past, even in the past of our own family or our own lives, that the past itself is another realm that is cut off from us as much as another country by distance. Changes in social structure, belief systems, language, and technology cut us off from understanding exactly what was meant by people in the past. For example, I am immensely fond of reading A Little Princess, something I have blogged about several times, but one alien feature of that excellent novel is the way in which the character of Sara Crewe continually refers to herself as “queer.” Now, it is obvious what she means, she is a quirky child who does not fit in because of her generous and noble character as well as because her delightfully odd personality (not so alien from my own). But in the 120 years between Miss Crewe and myself, the language of English became quite a bit more corrupted and decadent, so that there was a distance between her use of language and my own that was disconcerting and off-putting, though neither the fault of author or reader. Recognizing that the past is another country gives us the forewarning that when we deal with the past we have to seek to reconstruct the context of the past so that we can understand it on its own terms as much as possible, and recognize forthrightly the changes that have happened in the meantime–some good, some bad, some indifferent. For the research of the past is just like any other journey, and we need all the understanding and help that we can get so journey safely.

[1] Lyrics from memory.